Blog

Partner with Portland Public Schools and sign up as a guest speaker, host a job shadow, or be a mentor, powered by FMYI!

Another "Did you know?" for you - we help track casting and production for hundreds of shows over the years! This is thanks to our wonderful customers Casting Duo​, BuzzFeed​, Kinetic Content​, Magical Elves​, Levity Entertainment Group​, Love Productions​, and many more. Learn more at: https://www.fmyi.com/more/

Did you know there's a growing number of nonprofits leveraging the FMYI visual database platform for program management and data reporting? Airway Science for Kids says this about using FMYI:

"The benefits have been tremendous, and we’ve communicated the business case for it to our board. We have been able to 'do more with less,' meaning that because we have a limited (small) staff that is highly mobile, we are able to provide timely information and documents without necessarily having to have a staff person housed at a physical location to collect or distribute information…Our Nonprofit OS serves as a communication tool to keep all of us connected, regardless of where they are and what their role in the organization is."

We're enjoying bringing an athlete's mindset to achieving goals at work. Inspired by fitness trackers, our revolutionary new visual dashboard and snapshot trackers show progress toward template checklists critical to your day to day workflow.

Companies like Nike rely upon our platform to track product-related processes with their project portfolios. It's been exciting to see a growing number of Nike employees enjoying the benefits of FMYI to reduce stress, easily track progress, and innovate.  

To quote the Nike shoebox we have, "Like athletes, we always keep trying to improve our performance. And we always will." Learn more about using FMYI for your product process: http://www.fmyi.com/product

It's back to school time for many, and we're excited to play a role in helping college counselors and mentors/coaches make an impact with students. Check out our college readiness goal tracking database template developed in partnership with College Access: Research & Action that's in 80+ schools in the New York City Department of Education:

https://www.fmyi.com/education/

Excited to partner with the University of Oregon on this important initiative from the Agora Journalism Center supporting engaged journalism across the country.

Check out FMYI’s latest Lunchtime Q&A with Michael, one of FMYI’s senior software engineers, on the topic of Open Source Software!

Entrepreneurs have many things in common including innovative ideas, a never give up mentality, and a drive to change the world. In this week’s Top 3 Reads we chose three business leaders who’ve beat the odds by running a successful business and are now looked upon for advice. Read these short bios to learn how they’ve done it:

1. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

This entrepreneur from Bangalore, India has now become one of the wealthiest women in India thanks to her biotechnology company, Biocon.

2. Andrew Carnegie

He strongly valued education and gave away 90% of his fortune to charities, foundations and universities before he died.

3. Richard Branson

From dropping out of school, to finding success in the media and travel industry, Richard Branson beat the odds to become the influential leader he is today.

Empower your team to become stronger and more successful by learning what makes teamwork work.  This week we chose articles full of tips on building a company culture that leads to success.  Read our top three articles to see how and why to change your company’s culture to one that encourages teamwork through open collaboration.

Getting to Better Ideas Through Collaboration Matt Saunby

Not only does collaboration allow your team to share ideas and give feedback, but it enables ideas to build off each other to create better solutions. Learn more benefits of creating an open collaboration environment at your company.  

The Secrets to Successful Teamwork: Trust and Accountability Rhonda Savage  

Does everyone on your team trust and respect each other?  Is your company’s environment set up for great teamwork?  Review these tips to help build trusting relationships with co-workers and to achieve team and company goals. 

10 Tips for Better Teamwork Susan M. Heathfield

Why do some teams work well together and others not? Company culture and employee expectations have a huge impact on a team’s success.  Explore these 10 tips to better understand how you can impact employee effectiveness and team participation.

We all love to feel productive in life and at work. Accomplishing tasks and jobs to achieve goals is rewarding and fulfilling, but are we the most productive that we can be? Or are there tips and tricks that will help us to focus and achieve more? Explore these three insightful articles on productivity to help achieve your goals.

1. How To Quit Your Multitasking Addiction By Darius Foroux

Are you an addict? Darius Foroux discusses how we are addicted to doing too many things at once, and how it affects our quality of work and life. Learn how to overcome your multi-tasking addiction to make your days more productive.

2. 15 Habits That Will Totally Transform Your Productivity By Stephanie Vozza

From getting rid of distractions to getting organized, read about 15 ways to make your life more productive. View this list of habits to find out what you already do and what you can start doing today.

3. Which Country Has the Most Productive Workers? By Jessica Stillman

The Rio Summer Games are over. I’m suffering some major withdrawal from the full range of human emotions on display. The excitement, inspiration, anguish, compassion, teamwork, and accomplishment was captivating.

Especially for a weekend warrior athlete like myself, where my victories and closest brush with Olympic greatness is running the Holiday Half Marathon “with” bronze medal winner Galen Rupp and “only” being double his 1 hour and 1 minute time.

So I can't quite relate to the experience of competing in the Olympics. But it  got me thinking about what we can learn from the athletes and apply at work, especially given my experiences working with Nike. How do they know when they’re ready to compete at the highest levels? What’s the process they follow to achieve their goals against the competition? I’ve come away with this rule of three:

1. Set goals and achieve them with checklists.

Since she was six years old, Katie Ledecky has been writing down goals:

"Goal setting has definitely stuck with me," she said. "Those 'want times' were always very ambitious. That part has carried on. I try to set goals that seem kind of unreasonable at first. As I work toward them, the more reasonable they look."

That way, her training can be tailored to meet specific targets. At work, making it clear with your team what goals need to be accomplished is fundamental for alignment of efforts.

But tracking progress and achieving success requires a process to achieve goals. This is where checklists are essential. You’ve heard about how important they are to surgeons, pilots, and businesses responding to natural disasters in the Checklist Manifesto. They’re a simple way to capture a process that’s visually familiar for people to follow.

Think about it. If you could take away all the ad hoc processes you have, complicated flow charts, and simplify the things you and your team do frequently at work into a series of checklists, wouldn’t it make accomplishing goals so much easier and clearer?

2. Gather data to measure outcomes.

After Rio, track sprinter Allyson Felix is the only female track athlete to have six gold medals. As she works toward achieving her goals, there is a lot of data analysis along the way. Having access to data related to goals is vitally important:

If it takes you 20 minutes to walk a few blocks, push yourself to walk that same distance in 15 minutes ― then 10 minutes. “You want to keep bringing that time down,” the sprinter said. “That’s going to almost give [you] the same benefit that running does.”

At work, you don’t just need the tasks. With so much going on, you need data related to goals, whether it’s project brief related, sales details, product attributes you’re tracking, budget figures, impact metrics, or anything else that may be living in a spreadsheet. That way, you can generate reports that allow you to track progress and measure outcomes by the criteria you’ve tagged your work with in one place.

To accelerate results, the key is integration of data with goals like Allyson’s example, not two different silos for each. Having a checklist separate from your data analytics dashboard doesn’t jumpstart change because there isn’t a process defined behind it.

3. Log insightful updates for improvement.

Triathlon gold medal winner Gwen Jorgensen is absolutely dominant, having won 13 races in a row. The former Ernst & Young accountant is dedicated to logging notes in her daily training journal. Gwen documents three things she does well, and three things she could improve upon so she can remember what helps to fuel future performances:

“If I need confidence, I look back on those three things I do well and that’s what gives me confidence going into a race.” She also does a race report after every event to help capture each element to help in the future. “I go through what I was thinking on the swim, the bike and the run, and that’s something I look at with both the USAT High Performance team and my coach, and I analyze it to see if there are changes I can make to improve.”

And at work it’s no different. We need a history of changes, updates, and files. This is different from emails, texts, and instant messaging chats that fly around every day. It’s a log of notes that looks like a simple form to capture key details which is integrated with goals and data that create searchable institutional knowledge to fuel continuous improvement.

The process of becoming a champion starts with integrated goal, data, and log tracking. Are you ready?

About FMYI [for my innovation]

We’re a collaborative database software B Corporation headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Founded in 2004, we host millions of workspaces worldwide for companies, government agencies, nonprofits, and education organizations of all sizes while being featuring in TechCrunch, Bloomberg, and the New York Times.

How many times a day do you depend on numbers in spreadsheets, an old school legacy database, or hunting around to find things in emails, texts, and chat messages? You have a nagging feeling that there’s a better way to do it that matches your workflow and looks like something you'd get excited about, but you’re not sure how. Well, the solution is here.

Are you ready to accelerate innovation, growth, and impact? Achieve goals, track data, and log updates on the FMYI system. Get a demo of our new version.

The theme for our Top 3 Reads this week is leadership. Everyone plays a part on a team, but is there a natural born leader? Can anyone become one? Explore these articles on leadership in business and in life.

1. 7 Leadership Qualities You May Not Know You Have By Larry Kim

Did you know that sharing information or saying thank you are traits of a good leader? Read about the other five personality traits and see if you have them or can apply them to your leadership skill set.

2. What I learnt from “Turn the ship around!” By Sridhar

Learn why the Leader-Follower method may hinder a business, whereas the Leader-Leader method promotes endurance and resilience. Does your organization allow everyone to be a leader? Read how leadership can empower people to reach their full potential.

3. 5 Ways to Show Leadership at Work By Tom Gimbel

Achieving a goal can be challenging unless you know exactly what you want and how to get there. In this week’s Top 3 Reads, discover how an Olympic athlete makes the unreasonable reasonable and how meticulous goal tracking transforms willpower into measurable success.

1. Chasing Katie Ledecky By Philip Hersh

Olympic winner, Katie Ledecky, wins race after race by accomplishing goal after goal. Read how Katie begins by setting goals that look “unreasonable,” but as she gets closer to them, the more “reasonable” they get.

2. How Tracking Can Bolster Your Willpower Success By Ben Whittle

Have you ever wanted to improve your chances of accomplishing a goal? Try tracking them. It increases self awareness and you’re able to look back at your accomplishments and failures. Read more insights on goal tracking and why it is important to achieving goals.

3. Methods For Setting A Goal That Will Help You Achieve Your Potential By Ira Kalb

Today we are sharing our three favorite reads, just in time for the weekend. These articles will prepare you for a more collaborative and productive week with your team, and inspire you to make the most of your goals.

1. The Key to Successful Collaboration By Julia Khusainova

Learn about the benefits of collaboration. See how it brings alignment between team members on product goals, removes roadblocks, and increases productivity so that teams can get their product into the hands of users faster.

2. 5 Steps to Ensure Cascading Goals That Promote Teamwork By David Dewolf

What makes an entire organization successful? Read how David Dewolf uses collaboration, teamwork, and dependencies to achieve his company’s business goals.

3. When You Fail To Achieve Your Goals, Try Systems Instead By Darius Foroux

Biking is big at FMYI. Nearly half of our employees ride their bikes to the office everyday. That’s why we were excited to see the launch of Biketown – Portland’s new bike-share program. In fact, our founder and board chair of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, Justin Yuen, was one of the first people to test out these artistically designed Nike bikes at the launch party. 

Because we love bikes so much and know they contribute to our employee’s health and happiness, we wanted to share information on bike-shares and biking benefits, and hope to inspire readers to get out and get biking!

1.   Why Bike? It makes us happy, researchers say By Liz Murphy

We know biking burns calories, reduces air pollution, relieves traffic congestion, and costs less than car ownership, but now see the statistics on happiness and biking from researchers at Clemson and the University of Pennsylvania.

2.   Why Bike-Share is Really Very Safe By Aarian Marshall

Although there has been one bike-share related death since the first bike-share program started in the U.S., bike-shares are still considered safer than riding personal bikes in American cities. Read why.

3.   Cycling is the New Golf By G.D.

After another summer week of heat, some leftover fireworks, and a chocolate coconut cupcake, we would like to end the week by sharing our Top 3 Reads--our staff picks to inspire new ideas on improving your team's day-to-day productivity and expanding your marketing growth strategies.

One Best Productivity Trick By Gina Trapani  Learn how Gina Trapani makes the most of her work day and life. She offers tips that have helped her get tasks done, accomplish goals and improve her life.

Why Most Startups Suck At PR and How to Fix It To Get More Press Right Now By Dave Gerhardt  See why start ups shouldn’t start their days with the Journal or the Times any more. Dave Gerhardt talks about common PR mistakes and how to avoid them. 

How Brooklinen used word-of-mouth to grow a $15 mil. bedding business By Yuyu Chen Read how Brooklinen's word-of-mouth referral marketing becomes the cornerstone of its business, almost quadrupling its revenue.

At FMYI, we are dedicated to a sustainable office and lifestyle. Last week we shared a daily #greentip with our Instagram followers to help improve sustainability in their workspace – providing easy ways a team can consume less, reduce waste, and help decrease their office’s carbon footprint.

Today, we recap our seven sustainability tips:

Green Tip #1: Compost

Do you know that over 60% of our landfills is organic waste? This includes food scraps, yard debris, and paper that decomposes into soil as plant nutrients. Having a compost bin at your office will reduce your team’s overall garbage output and slow down the filling of landfills.

Green Tip #2: Use Non-Toxic Cleaners

The average household contains about 62 toxic chemicals. Ingredients in common household products have been linked to asthma, cancer, reproductive disorders, hormone disruption and neurotoxicity. Try using baking soda and vinegar to clean your desk, doorknobs, floors, and walls, rather than using potentially, harmful toxic cleaners.

Green Tip #3:  Bike, Bus, or Carpool

Start a rideshare program for employees that live in the same neighborhood. Having employees carpool, bike or bus to work reduces parking issues, road traffic, pollution, and may even help employees get to know each other better outside of the office.

Green Tip #4: Plants

Invest in easy-care, indoor plants that require little watering and sunlight. Some of our staff favorites include the spider plant, dragon plant, mother of tongue plant, peace lily, and fern. These plants are hardy and can withstand low-light, low-water environments. They are also specifically good at cleaning/purifying the air from formaldehyde, benzene and carbon monoxide. Additionally, having plants in a workspace has proven to help concentration, memory and productivity.

Green Tip #5: Buy in Bulk

Shopping for bulk items reduces wasteful packaging and saves time by making fewer trips to the store.

Green Tip #6: Invest in a Communal Garbage Bin

Office bins are often lined with plastic bags which are ultimately are thrown in the garbage themselves. Another way to reduce landfill waste is to invest in a single communal garbage bin to replace multiple individual bins. This also gives employees an excuse to stand up and get a little exercise. 

Green Tip #7: Invest in Reusable Cutlery

Many offices purchase disposable cutlery and plates to avoid washing dishes and to speed up cleaning. However, investing in reusable cutlery and dishes means producing significantly less waste – consider an office of twenty people. If each person uses at least two utensils and a disposable container per meal or snack, consider how many items are thrown away each month!  Reduce this waste completely by offering cutlery and dishes made of stainless steel, washable recycled materials, or ceramic. 

Take part in a better world today. Get started and create a goal to follow one #greentip each week. If we all do a little, we can help reduce waste, reduce the filling of landfills, and make positive changes within our communities.